Jesus is the Reason

Part 3, A Talk to Christian Coaches

Last year I was invited by a friend, who is a High School Athletic Director, to address all the coaches of the school at their start of year orientation meeting. The topic I was asked to address for the gathered coaches was this: What makes a High School athletic program Christian? And by "Christian" we mean unique and distinctive as compared to athletic programs in public schools.

I started by asking the coaches to share their coaching values and commitments. What is it that you say as a coach, over and over and over, that captures the goals you have for your athletes and team?

In my experience with sports, in High School and college, along with watching my eldest son play three sports during his High School years, I'd suggest that the values expressed by most coaches boils down to one of three things. The first is effort and commitment. Coaches want you to be "all in" and to give "110%", and they have a variety of sound-bite ways of communicating this to the team year to year. A second theme is a team-first commitment over selfishness. As coaches say, "There is no I in TEAM." And finally, the are aspirational commitments. As Ted Lasso's famous sign in the locker rooms declares, you have to "Believe."

Effort. Team First. Believe. Broadly speaking, in various packages, these are the value commitments among athletic programs. And these were the commitments among the coaches I was speaking to.

Knowing that, I asked the coaches a question: "Would you find these same commitments--Effort, Team First, and Believe--in the athletic programs of public schools?" And the answer is: Of course you would. And if that is so, what's the difference between a Christian school athletic program and a public school athletic program? Not much at all, when you look at their values and commitments. The public school values are the same as the Christian school values. Christian and public schools say exactly same thing: "Here at this school we give 100% effort, we play unselfishly, and we believe."

The reason we don't find differences between public and Christian school athletic programs is because of warrant theology. In the Christian school context we don't change the values of the program--Effort, Team First, Believe--we just change the warrant. We do exactly the same thing as everyone else, we just do it for different reasons. What makes the Christian school "Christian" isn't the goal but the warrant.

Let me give an illustration of this. Perhaps the most common devotional talk you hear in Christian athletic programs is a reflection about the Parable of the Talents. In the parable the servant who is given many talents invests those talents. This servant is praised. By contrast, the servant who buries their talents is chastised. In the hands of Christian athletic programs, this is a parable about effort, about a commitment to excellence. Given our opportunities and talents we must "be good stewards" in getting a maximal return for the gifts we have been given. 

For this post, I don't want to discuss if this is, in fact, a proper interpretation of the parable. I simply want to use it as an illustration of warrant theology. The goal of this type of devotional talk isn't to point me toward a distinctive Christian telos or goal. The goal of the devotional talk is to keep the goal of Effort but provide that goal with a Christian warrant, that God wants us to "be good stewards" of our opportunities and gifts. 

Now, of course, God wants us to be good stewards. I'm not denying that. I also think young people need the virtues shaped by Effort, Team First, and Believe. We want to keep these things. But the challenge I put before the coaches in my talk was this: If you only keep Jesus as warrant you never get around to thinking about or forming uniquely Christian outcomes for your program. Christian athletic programs lack Christian distinctiveness because all we do is change the warrant. Like the public schools, we want a commitment to excellence, but we pursue excellence because of the Parable of the Talents, not for "secular" reasons.

A uniquely Christian athletic program, I shared with the coaches, moves away from warrants to look at goals and outcomes. We stop using Jesus to do exactly what everyone else is already doing. Instead, we look toward programatic outcomes that are distinctively Christian. I nudged the coaches to ask themselves this question, "What are you doing with your team that only makes sense in light of your Christian commitments?" Such questions move you away from warrant theology to think about Christ-shaped goals and ends.